


Like Real People Do

by lookingforthestars



Category: Runaways (TV 2017)
Genre: Chase being a giant sap because it's my favorite, F/M, First Date, a WHOLE lot of fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-18
Updated: 2020-01-18
Packaged: 2021-02-27 14:08:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,404
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22298350
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lookingforthestars/pseuds/lookingforthestars
Summary: Gert and Chase take a break from being Runaways to go on their first official date.
Relationships: Chase Stein/Gertrude Yorkes
Comments: 4
Kudos: 51





	Like Real People Do

**Author's Note:**

> For the record, I don't usually crank out fanfic this frequently. I just CAN'T STOP. I have too many Gertchase feelings and too many ideas and I just rewatched all three seasons so it's at an all-time high right now. I'm sure it will calm down. Eventually. But in the meantime, you know, thanks for fangirling with me.

_Dates are so heteronormative._

Didn’t stop her from being nervous for this one, did it?

And, to top off the hypocrisy sundae, it was her idea. Man, Chase really had a way of turning her worldview upside down, didn’t he?

It was sort of stupid to be this nervous. Chase loved her, and the smile he gave her when she suggested it was almost blinding. They just had never been together in the real world, without the chaos of battling aliens and witches and the high sodium content of so many packaged snacks. The dramatic part of her brain couldn’t help but remind her that the second they stepped out of the Hostel and into the light, everything could come crumbling down. Chase might finally come to his senses and realize they weren’t running anymore, he had the whole world to choose from, and she was only holding him back.

Gert couldn’t imagine ever reaching a point where she didn’t feel that way, but it wasn’t like they could hide away from society forever. They weren’t wanted for murder, they weren’t hiding from a glowing psychopath or trying to stop a cell phone-triggered apocalypse, they weren’t fighting for their lives. Maybe they could just go get pizza and be normal for a few hours, before they ran headfirst into the next crisis.

If she could just stop stalling.

“Babe? Are you ready?”

His voice was coming from the bottom of the stairs, which meant he was ready to go and probably had been for at least ten minutes. Gert smiled. She really, really never thought she would enjoy being called _babe_.

With Chase, she was discovering a lot of things she hadn’t expected. “Yeah. Be there in a second.”

* * *

“Oh my god,” Gert sighed, lifting her thumb to her mouth to catch the last bit of butter from her garlic knot. It wasn’t ladylike, but whatever, she wasn’t in the habit of wasting food anymore and that was delicious. “I forgot how amazing restaurant food is.”

Chase’s cheeks turned pink and Gert smirked, enjoying how easily she managed to fluster him. It was only fair, considering how much he could work her up with barely any effort. “This is up there on the list of things I’ve missed,” he agreed, catching a piece of pasta with his fork. “It’s kind of weird to eat something that doesn’t come out of a bag.”

The restaurant wasn’t fancy – they were still being careful with money, even if they didn’t technically have to be, because it felt too weird to start relying on their parents again and _stuff_ just didn’t have the same appeal as it used to. She and Chase had both gotten pretty used to wearing thrift store clothing and buying the generic brand of everything, and it had kept them alive, hadn’t it?

“I’m surprised Molly’s skin isn’t permanently orange from the Cheetos,” she said with a giggle. “It’s really impressive that none of us got scurvy.”

“Or diabetes. Nico’s sweet tooth is out of control.”

Gert snorted. “ _Sugar helps fuel my magic, okay?_ ” she said in a weak imitation of Nico’s voice.

Chase laughed, and for a minute they were quiet, just smiling at each other. “This is nice.”

“Yeah.” Gert bit her lip, feeling herself blush for absolutely no reason except that Chase looked beautiful under the string lights and it blew her mind that he was sitting across from her staring at her like that. “I was worried it might be awkward.”

He raised his eyebrow. “Us, awkward? Never.”

That set them off again. Gert knew she was being stereotypical, just a dumb girl laughing at everything a cute boy said like it was the funniest thing in the world.

But she was just…happy. And light. Lighter than she’d felt for such a long time. 

They took the long way around. But they got there, eventually, and things that were worth having usually didn’t come easy. Maybe everything happened exactly the way it was supposed to.

* * *

“Really? This is all you wanted to do?”

Chase looked down at her, a hint of uncertainty creeping into his eyes. “Disappointed?”

“No. Just surprised. I pegged you as more of a mini-golf guy or something.”

He smirked. “Maybe I’m keeping the bar low so I don’t have to keep impressing you with bigger and better dates.”

They were together now, _of course_ there were going to be more dates, but hearing him say it still stirred up pleasant fluttering in Gert’s stomach.

Chase’s preferred after-dinner activity tonight was a walk in the park. Literally. They were strolling along the edge of an open field, the trees covered in lights and the moonlight reflecting off the water. Occasionally they passed another couple or a family with young kids, a few nighttime runners, but mostly it was quiet. And that was surprisingly nice. They hadn’t gotten a lot of quiet in the past year. “It’s really pretty here.”

“Yeah. I used to come here a lot, actually. Just to work out or…to think, sometimes.”

“About what?” Gert murmured, leaning her head on his shoulder and tightening her hand in his. If anyone asked, she would insist it was because the air was getting colder and he was always warm, _not_ because of her compulsive need to be close to him. “Lacrosse strategy?” she teased.

Chase smirked. “You, mostly.”

Oh.

_Oh._

When Gert had rebooted, she stopped abruptly, their entangled hands forcing Chase to stop too. He turned to face her, his expression more serious than she was prepared for. “Really?”

He nodded, closing the distance between them to brush her hair behind her ear. Gert noticed he had a habit of doing that when he was trying to settle himself, focus himself. “I know you thought we were thrown together by the circumstances, and all that. But that wasn’t the start of it, for me. I loved you for a long time before we ran away.”

Breathing clearly wasn’t enough of a challenge already, because Gert opened her big mouth and all but whispered, “How long?”

“I don’t know,” Chase admitted with a shrug. “It probably started when we were kids. But I know when I realized it.”

Was it terrible that Gert never wanted Chase to stop saying stuff like this to her, even though it made her feel like she was going to spontaneously combust? “Yeah?”

“Yeah. You were, uh…you were in the parking lot with Molly. She was crying pretty hard and you were just hugging her, saying stuff to her that I couldn’t hear. I don’t even know why she was upset.”

It wasn’t hard to place the memory. Molly was an obnoxiously positive person, and it took a lot to break her down. “I remember that. She got into a fight with Dale and Stacey and she was really torn up about missing her parents. It was hard to see her like that.”

Chase nodded. “You were just so tough all the time, you know? It made me remember how kind you were when you cared about someone. And I remembered…how it felt when you cared about me.” His voice cracked a little, and he cleared his throat to overcome it. “I just knew, finally. I knew what that feeling was.”

Gert swallowed, fighting the urge to cry. She didn’t remember exactly when that happened, but it was definitely after they lost Amy, after the group had splintered. “Why didn’t you say anything?” she asked, her voice embarrassingly emotional. “I wanted you back in my life so much, but I felt stupid, because I thought there was no way you wanted that too.”

“You weren’t into guys like me. You weren’t into _me_. You’d made it pretty clear that I wasn’t good enough to be your friend or anything else.”

“Chase…”

He exhaled, shaking his head. “I’m not saying that to guilt you, Gert. It’s just how I felt back then. I went after other girls, figured if I wasn’t enough for you, maybe I could be enough for someone else. And then at the dance I realized you didn’t think I was a joke. I figured maybe I actually had a chance.”

She didn’t intentionally use her defense mechanisms to hurt other people, just to keep herself from getting hurt. Deep down, she didn’t think she could hurt him. He was hot and popular and smart, and she was just _Gert_ , why would he care what she thought?

Sometimes she really was selfish.

“You’re not a joke, Chase. You’re incredible. And I’m sorry that I spent so much time making you feel like you didn’t matter. Like you didn’t matter to me.” Great, now her voice was cracking. “I just wanted you. Too much. I didn’t know how to handle it. Especially when you had girls like Eiffel glued to you all the time.”

“Gert,” he said, in the gentle way that made her physically swoon a little. “Yeah, other girls were attracted to me. Just like other guys were attracted to you.” There was the smallest hint of jealousy in his voice, and Gert didn’t think she would ever get used to that, Chase Stein feeling jealous over _her_. “But they didn’t actually care about me. They didn’t know anything about me, they didn’t know that whole lacrosse douchebag thing was an act. You knew I was hiding, but no one else did. Finding someone who’s willing to hook up with you and finding someone who knows you inside and out and still loves you…that’s not the same thing.”

She’d never considered that, had she? That what Chase actually wanted – _needed_ – was to be loved in exactly the way she loved him?

In an instant, all of the reasons she had for not saying the words out loud disintegrated, because they were all for her and she finally, maybe for the first time, understood what they would mean to him. “I do,” she said, her voice a little shaky because this was honestly maybe the most nerve-wracking thing she had ever done. “Love you, I mean.”

“Yeah?” His eyes were bright, hopeful, and it was funny, Gert thought. As much as Nico and Karolina liked to joke that they were light and dark, perfectly balanced, she and Chase weren’t much different. They were light and dark too, two halves of a whole, if maybe a bit less literally.

“Yeah. It was, uh…you and Alex were fighting in the hallway. He bumped into you and you guys were just in this, like, dick measuring contest.” Chase laughed. Some things hadn’t changed. “But then he walked away, and your face was…I don’t know. You looked sad. Like you missed him. And you and Alex weren’t even close, so I figured if you missed him, maybe you missed the rest of us too. It was harder to convince myself that I hated you after that. Harder to pretend. And if I couldn’t hate you, then I had to face what I actually did feel.”

Chase nodded again, looking a little choked up. “I did miss you guys. So much. But especially you.” He squeezed her hand, thumb running over her fingers. “Always you. Pretty much every day.”

“Wow, we wasted a lot of time, didn’t we?” She was aiming for lighthearted, but her voice was too thick, too uneven. This was an awful lot of emotional honesty for one conversation.

“Maybe. Maybe not. I mean…maybe it was better that we waited until we wouldn’t screw it up? Or screw it up again, at any rate.”

Gert laughed humorlessly. “I don’t know, I still think I’m pretty capable of screwing things up. We’ve established that my mouth can cause a lot of trouble and I’m never going to be very good at shutting up.”

Chase cocked his head, giving her a look that usually meant _breathe Gert, you’re going to a weird place._ “I like your mouth,” he said matter-of-factly, her mind cycling through the many possible implications of that statement. “I spent most of my life just trying to be quiet. Trying to disappear. And you make yourself heard. You refuse to hide. You remind me that I don’t have to either.”

It was times like those, when Chase seemed so confident about her, about _them_ , that Gert could tell her anxiety to bugger off for a few minutes and entertain the thought that maybe she and Chase were truly, genuinely perfect for each other.

Gert had a very strong feeling that she was going to ramble if she tried to answer, so she did what she did best and changed the subject. “It’s kind of funny, you know,” she mused, twining their fingers together. “Talking about high school. So much has happened since then, it probably shouldn’t matter.”

_You saved my life. And you gave up everything to do it. You gave up your life._ It always hung in the air between them, too big to touch. She didn’t know how to talk about it, didn’t know what she would even say. But it was there. When Chase was unusually silent, or when he was too tired to be intimate, or one of the other five million triggers that made her wonder if that was the day he would leave her, she tried to hold on to the knowledge of how far he would go for her.

“It feels good to talk about it. For me, at least. I spent a lot of time holding it in. We’ve all kept a lot of secrets.” Chase met her eyes, his mouth ticking up in the corners, and god, it was a miracle that she didn’t just sit around staring at him all day. He was easy to get lost in. “I just…I’m glad that you know. Everything.”

He loved her. That was all she needed to know. The other stuff was just icing on the cake.

Gert’s palm came up to his cheek, her thumb brushing his temple, and she barely caught him melting into the touch before her lips were on his. He kissed her the way he always did – like he was going to lose her any second and like they had all the time in the world, all at once.

Yeah, dates were heteronormative. They were probably also, like everything else with Chase, something Gert would never get enough of.


End file.
